


the tragedy of narcissus

by ficfucker



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Other, Unhealthy Relationships, post fight club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:40:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23148631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficfucker/pseuds/ficfucker
Summary: I am a corpse on the slab.Tyler is the mortician who's going to open me up and pull out the ropes of my guts and tell me what they're worth.Tyler's going to reanimate me.
Relationships: Tyler Durden/Narrator
Comments: 2
Kudos: 45





	the tragedy of narcissus

**Author's Note:**

> tried to channel some palahniuk style 
> 
> leans more towards the book but i like the name jack better than joe so that's what the narrator is called here

I've fallen pathetically into the same river Narcissus drowned in, at first thrashing wildly like some runt kitten tossed in off the highway to avoid weakening an otherwise healthy litter, and now swimming absently. 

It's easy to forget how fucked you are when it becomes daily. Like how Nazi soldiers could drop Zyklon B down tubes onto countless Jewish lives then go play cards with other SS officers during their downtime. 

How much more narcissistic can you get than fucking an alter when he isn't fronting for you? 

I'm sure Tyler has a good answer. 

Tyler, knight in shining armor glistening with serpentine streaks of blood so thickly lain they look dark as chocolate syrup, has a good answer for everything. 

* * *

  
  


"You want to sleep, don't you?" 

I don't answer. I roll over onto my side on the thin government-issued cot all patients have and tuck my hands under my head as if I'm actually going to doze off like an infant. 

"The endorphins and physical exertion will put you under like the sedatives you spit back into those little paper cups they give you," Tyler continues. 

"And why do you think I spit them?" 

I can hear Tyler exhale from his cigarette and if I didn't know he was a fantastic photo real hallucination of my own workings, I'd think that small detail so genuine. The release of smoke and the tangy, biting smell wafting down over my face in ashy sheets. 

Good one, brain. You really paid attention to the small stuff tonight. 

"Any act of self-destruction is noble when you're in a place like this," Tyler says instead of answering. “Shows them you’re alive. Shows them you’re not just cattle walking down the curved corridors to slaughter.”

"I'm not letting you jerk me off." 

"Fighting and fucking aren't so far from each other, you know. You've already taken one swing. What's one more?" 

I snort. 

Tyler takes another long drag. "Who could fuck you better than someone who knows you so well?" 

I close my eyes and imagine what it would look like from an outsider perspective: me writhing on my perfectly white mental institution bed with a hand over my mouth, the other tarantula walking down my drawstringless scrub bottoms, moaning out "Tyler… Oh, Tyler…!" as if there was anyone else there besides myself. 

It would be an impressive miming act: wrestling an invisible man who's pinning you down, who's trying to fuck you as much as he's trying to fight you. 

"Masturbation, mutual or not, is out of the question." 

Tyler's quiet for once. 

It's a blessing I don't get often. 

I've been awake for 5 straight days. 

It's not so bad when the sun is up and nurses are letting you do arts and crafts so long as they don't involve scissors. I can manage that. I say yes when they want me to say yes. I eat when they want me to eat. It's like being in school again: set mindlessly to the Pavlovian reaction of a bell system. 

At night, though, Tyler is much more present and wholly more talkative. 

And tonight, he's sick of not getting the reigns. 

If I don't put myself out, he doesn't get to be in charge. 

"The textbooks are going to have a field day with you," Tyler says, sitting up beside me. He gets out of bed and crosses the room in his bunny slippers to the postage stamp bathroom I've been allowed due to good behavior, and drops his cigarette butt into the toilet. 

I can't help myself; I sit up in bed. 

Tyler stands there with his hip cocked out confidently, the low light of the fluorescent bulb he's switched on casting his shadow long and thin across the tile floor to the foot of my bed. His pajama bottoms are loose. 

Because Tyler is some part of my own cognitive desires, he has drawstrings.

And because he’s Tyler, he hasn’t tied them and they dangle like limp fruit from his waist.

"Man with dissociative identity double falls in love with alter and fucks him nightly,” Tyler says, flashing his hands up for emphasis. “You’ll be a miracle case study. German and Swedish doctors will fly in just to poke at your brain.”

“I think calling it love is taking it a little too far.” I lay down and turn away.

Tyler comes back to sit on the edge of my bed and he stretches himself out. “Newspapers are never honest. They’ll blow it out of proportion one way or another.”

I close my eyes. 

_ I am Jack’s aching muscles of fatigue. _

Tyler, slow as a chameleon making the decision of which branch to advance to, places his hand to my hip. I lie there like a corpse under a shroud in the morgue, waiting to be taken apart. 

_ I am Jack’s unwanted arousal.  _

“If my doctor had prescribed me something for my insomnia, I never would have made you.”

Tyler chuckles and I can picture him doing that perfect Hollywood smile of his. “Oh, is that what you think? That if you got doped up, none of this would have happened?” 

I reach up and place my hand over his were it rests on my hip. My fingers trail along the ragged, glassy scar of his own kiss that marks the back of his hand below the knuckles like a brand stamped into cattle. 

“I’d be asleep,” I say. “In Ireland. I’d count sheep. I’d be in the cave of myself and you never would have come along and pulled me out of it.” 

Tyler trails his hand down an inch further so it’s dipped into the waist of my drawstringless scrubs and touches the bone of my hip that juts from the skin like a bent tombstone sticking out from the dirt. “When you sleep, I get to play. Pills don’t fix that, Jack. Even in here, this freedom in a cage, I’m still keeping you company.”

_ I am Jack’s distracting erection.  _

“Get it over with then,” I submit. 

If Tyler is me, that means I want it. I’ve manifested him to fuck me to sleep. 

I must be sicker than Tyler allows me to believe I am.

Tyler fucks like a freight train derailing into a snowbank. I remember all those nights hearing him (me?) pipe Marla into oblivion. His calculated deliberation is both exciting and worrisome, the anticipation right before the tattoo gun digs the needles into you. 

“Thatta boy,” Tyler murmurs. 

With my eyes still closed, I remember learning somewhere that Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, Angel of Death, would give Jewish children sugar and ask them to call him Uncle Mengele, only minutes before sawing off limbs and beating the stomachs of pregnant women to force them to miscarry. 

Maybe somehow, sickly, this is similar. 

_ Here’s you’re sugar, Jack, now go off to sleep.  _

_ Here’s your medicine, Jack.  _

_ Hey, Jack, if you melt down your plastic orange juice bottles and get your hands on some petrol, man oh man, we could get ourselves out of here right quick… _

Tyler rolls me over on the small cot and I let him, lying limply, liking the feeling of his hands on my hips, his hands palming my neck to get me to turn. 

I am a corpse on the slab. 

Tyler is the mortician who's going to open me up and pull out the ropes of my guts and tell me what they're worth. 

Tyler's going to reanimate me. 

I open my eyes and look up at him and hate myself for it. I hate that I still think he's handsome, that he could be the featured interview in some global magazine if he put on a tie and combed his hair. I hate that with one glance, I think, "There's my friend, Tyler Durden, the man who saved the world by destroying it. Good ole Tyler." 

Tyler rocks back so he's straddling my hips. Air comes out of me like a tire being uncapped before being pumped full. 

How fitting. 

His hand comes up to my face and I wince, from habit, thinking he's going to pound his knuckles into my teeth, but instead, he presses his finger into the craterous pockmark of a scar on my cheek. 

Someone left that there. 

I can't even remember who. 

"Yes, you can," Tyler says, sternly, his voice hushed. 

Sometimes Tyler knows just what I'm thinking before I even get the chance to say it. 

"I thought you wanted to put me out," I say. "No time to get sentimental." 

Tyler's face clouds up, but instead of turning into a scowl, he flashes a shark grin and shrugs and says, "Okay, Jack, we can go at it, if you want it so bad." 

Unceremoniously, Tyler works his hands into my pants and forces the scrubs down enough that my erection springs free and even for myself, it's so pathetic, I wrench my head away. 

"Eager thing." Tyler curls his fingers around me. His palm is surprisingly soft, probably from his human fat soap, and he jerks me lazily, less energy than I had expected. "Gave you one taste and you've wanted it ever since." 

I grunt a response. My hips tremble like a plane experiencing bad turbulence. 

Tyler uses one hand to pump me over, his thumb swiping my gathering precum with every other upswing, and his free hand goes to his own pants. He works them down and I watch with one eye open. His cock hangs heavy with interest between his legs. 

"You're a smart man, Jack," Tyler says and then he crawls over me. 

His weight is suffocating but it feels good. Good in the same way it feels good to suck in sharply when you've got a rotten tooth and want to feel the ache. Tyler wrangles my scrubs off, tosses them aside, useless as a candy wrapper. 

He spits into his hand and I know what comes next. 

My stomach coils hotly. I'm a time bomb. I'm a rocket shooting to Mars. I'm here, in my sterile, stiff-sheet cot, with Tyler Durden getting ready to work me open and fuck me to sleep like it's a timed event. 

"Breathe in," Tyler says. 

"Relax your jaw," Tyler says. 

Tyler says, "Look at me," and I look at him. 

His middle finger goes in first and the spit doesn't ease the friction much at all, a terrible, burning drag as he breeches me, and I gasp out. 

It's nothing compared to a kiss powdered with searing, bubbling lye, but it's also nothing near pleasant. 

Tyler captures my gaping fish mouth with his chapped lips and roughly inserts his tongue past my teeth, stuffs it into my cheek like a bank robber shoving money into a sack. I crane my neck up stupidly, chasing him. 

Next is his trigger finger. Tears well unwantedly in my clenched eyes and I focus on Tyler's sloppy, heated kissing. Meditative. Distancing. I'm in Tyler's mouth. I'm far away. There's no pain. 

Tyler works me open. It doesn't take much. He scissors and hooks and slides them out. 

I feel strangely empty. 

"You think this says anything about your daddy issues?" Tyler asks, sitting back. He drops a wad of foamy spit into his palm and lathers his dick with it. 

"You have more daddy issues than me," I say blankly. 

Tyler smiles like I've just told him a delightful secret, then grabs me under the thighs, folds me in half, and presses his dick against me. He kind of ruts a few times before thrusting in, harsh and straight as a sucker punch. 

I make a gutted sound. I don't know what to do with my hands. 

Tyler groans as he slams into me and it hurts, feels like I'm being broken in half, a wishbone being snapped, but it's such a steady pain. Familiar. The comfort of knowing the ground will be there to catch your slumped body after you've been belted. 

Call me masochistic. 

I whimper lamely under Tyler while he drives into me and he smiles smug, sweat dripping down from his hair, sliding down his nose. "Thatta boy," he repeats. 

My body's being pushed up to the headboard. Tyler's fucking me right into the wall and I'm sure it's making a terrible sound, loud enough that even my zombied out neighbors will complain, but I allow it. 

It feels good. 

I finally figure out what to do with my hands and frantically jerk myself off. I'm whimpering and writhing and Tyler snaps his hips into me over and over. 

It's nearly too much. 

If you added the roaring audience of cheering, frenzied men waiting for me to go under, it'd be too much, too much the same to fight club. 

Luckily it's only me and Tyler and I'm getting close. 

My nuts clench up like the seam of a walnut, rocked tight, and my stomach drops out roller-coaster style, and I open my mouth to say something. No noise comes out. 

I ejaculate onto Tyler's lower stomach in thin, sticky ropes that drip down to his pubic hair. 

My mind cigarette burns over to another scene, completely gone from me, eyes rolled into my head, fireworked into the ceiling, and when I come back, Tyler is grunting and emptying himself into me. 

It's kind of gross, the warm that spreads wetly inside me, like a rug soaking up hot piss. 

Tyler eases out. I'm positive my thighs are bruised. 

I pant humidly, weighed down with sudden sleep, my eyelids drooping. It feels like coming back from an adrenaline rush, my muscles almost torn from being tensed so long. 

Tyler says something along the lines of, “Take it easy, kid,” and then I’m out.

* * *

I wade neutrally in the river of my narcissism. 

I spit my meds politely back into the white paper cups the nurses give me, certain to avoid any SSRIs that would ruin my sex drive. 

I say yes when they want me to say yes. I eat when they want me to eat. 

Doctors come and see me and write notes on clipboards from across the fake wood tables in private rooms. Tyler sits beside me, or sometimes he’s by the window, smoking. Doctors ask me things and Tyler speaks for me.

Tyler has a good answer for everything. 

Nurses say they’re so proud of my progress, how I’ve been sleeping so regularly. 

What they don’t know is most nights I’ve got Tyler’s cock shoved so far down my throat, my nose is pressed flatly into his lower stomach until I’m retching. How Tyler grabs me by the neck and shoves me onto my bed and fucks me sideways until I’m limp as a ragdoll. How some nights, if I’m lucky, Tyler will let me rut myself into him and slump down in the sweaty sheets. 

Every mental health session is a travel-sized distraction. 

It all leads back to Tyler. 

I’m a monkey strapped into a rocket shot from earth never to float back down again and with the wonderful, throbbing pleasure that comes with Tyler treating me like a street dog in bed, I’m okay with it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you immensely for reading
> 
> let me know what you think
> 
> kudos are appreciated


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